Wii Fit Plus/Tilt

Game: Wii Fit Plus, Nintendo, 2010, Wii
Beer: Tilt, 24 fl. oz., 12% abv
# of beers consumed during play: 1 1/2
Level Reached: There are no levels, only acute personal discomfort.
Level of Intoxication: Drunk

Game
When Nintendo unleashed their Wii upon the world, gamers everywhere sat up and took notice. With its easy to understand controls and innovative design, everyone from your mother and sister, to your grandmother, wife and even daughter were playing with Nintendo's Wii. In fact, so many previous non-gamers were brought into the fold by Nintendo's innocuous little machine, that many hardcore gamers decried the Wii as single-handedly killing the games industry. Despite such allegations, the Wii continued to chug along, meting out titles aimed directly at the casual audience. One such title is Wii Fit Plus, which is less of a real game, and more of a collection of fitness activities disguised as games. The primary focus of which is to finally offer gamers an opportunity to mix something they love with something that will help them not die. While the casual crowd (read: people who already work out) embraced Wii Fit readily, a large sector of hardcore gamers have staunchly avoided the Balance Board's wiles. For a time, I was one of them. Consider me a convert.

Gameplay
As already mentioned, Wii Fit Plus, along with the Balance Board accessory are really nothing more than high-tech workout tools. The natural evolution from those old morning aerobics shows, Wii Fit replaces the alarmingly cheery aerobics guides with creepy toy-like avatars that look like you (called Mii's, ask someone who owns a Wii for an explanation), and in at least one case, super-ultra-turbo creepy animated mannequins with bleached white skin and blank facial expressions. I promise you, yoga will become a playground of nightmares. For most of the activities on offer, of which there is surprising variety, mini-games have been constructed in an attempt to distract you from the fact that you haven't exercised since the day you found out what a television was. Each mini-game has a specific emphasis regarding exercise type and level of exertion, from standing in place and wiggling your hands to briskly jogging in place to contorting your body into shapes that would make the neighbors call the police. Each mini-game has several levels of difficulty or intensity, and if you actually do what you're instructed to do, yes, you will indeed find yourself exercising. The part about Wii Fit that is pretty cool is that it isn't just a mish-mash of mini-games designed to make you tired, it is actually an entire suite created to help you set goals, track your fitness levels, and measure your progress in real time. Unfortunately, this is a double-edged sword. While on the one hand, it may actually be that tiny catalyst that takes someone and helps them turn their lifestyle around to become a fitter, healthier person; it also has just as much potential to either be used a handful of times before being completely given up on, or something that will be altogether ignored in the first place. Also, neglect it for even a day, and when you finally do fire the thing back up, Wii Fit will gleefully tell you what a lazy, good-for-nothing fat-ass you are and demonstrate this in graph form.


All baldly honest critiques of your physical health aside, it is actually quite easy to begin a level-appropriate regimen in the game. Once you've finished with the fitness tests and have made a mark on a calender, you will have the opportunity to choose from a staggering number of fit-centric mini-games. Some of the best games are actually the simplest, including jogging through a park where the Wiimote is in your pocket and acts as a pedometer (a thing that tracks your number of steps, not how much free candy you have left in the back of your van), a bicycle ride through the same park adding waygates to run through, rhythm kung-fu and boxing games, which will cause you to break a sweat, and obstacle courses which show you just how much it would suck ass to be Mario for real. Of course, this is only the smallest fraction of games and activities on offer, and really, if I went and tried to detail them all, this review would take forever. Suffice it to say that no matter what you might consider a workout, Wii Fit Plus will have something to offer you. Even if you have always had a secret desire to practice Yoga with those crazy doll things from Silent Hill.

I feel it bears mentioning at this point that seeing as the major accessory used throughout all this is called the Wii Balance Board, there are a significant number of tests and activities that do rely on good balance to pass. Now, I don't have the worst balance in the world, but some of the things you are required to do were apparently designed by a faerie ballerina with the ability to command the forces of gravity. On more than one occasion, the game, in it's ceaselessly cheery tone, inferred that i was a blind, one legged donkey with an inner-ear infection. Then, just so there were no misunderstandings, handily demonstrated this fact through the use of pictures. While positive reinforcement, rewards, and milestones are all great ways to encourage progress, Nintendo demonstrates that abuse is still the greatest motivator of all. Anyone who has ever played Super Mario Bros. The Lost Levels will immediately know what I'm talking about. Also, and this relates directly to my own personal experience here, being drunk will never help you at any point in time during Wii Fit.


Once you get good enough at the basic versions of the mini-games, you will begin to unlock more advanced versions, quickly taking you from a breezy, fun 5-minute step warm-up to a grueling, goosestepping hate-dance that will cause you to twist your ankle on the edge of the Wii Board and hobble angrily back to the nearest game console that has never even heard of the term "motion controls".

Now, with all that said, it should come as no surprise to anyone that while the mini-games on offer are indeed quite robust and well portioned, they are still mini-games. Nothing can take away from the fact that at the end of the day, you are still playing a short, disjointed game with simple controls and a flat difficulty curve. If you are looking for a long, flowing story arc, intricate controls, and a gently sweeping ramp in difficulty, you not only need to look elsewhere, but you most likely get lost on the way from the front of the school bus to the back, and you need someone to hold your hand. Really, the simplest way to describe the experience here is less a game and more like those fancy treadmills with TV screens hooked up to them. The fundamental goal here is to distract you while you are doing something you don't particularly like. Then again, if you've been drinking, the goal is to turn you into a piece of live performance art for the entertainment of everyone in the immediate vicinity.

Graphics/Sound
Ahh yes the Wii, the system that boldly put concerns of graphical horsepower on the backburner for the sake of providing innovative motion controls. In this vein at least, Wii Fit Plus is falling directly in line with that ideal. The graphics being more of a facilitator to the exercise-oriented gameplay, there definitely isn't going to be anything that really screams "look at me" aside from the now-familiar cute characters and relentlessly bright and cheery colors, which, after playing a few hours of Gears of Modern Warfare will seem like a Grateful Dead blacklight poster. Of course, trees look like trees, hula hoops look appropriately hoopy, and really, I cannot stress this quite enough, those Yoga instructors look completely dead inside. Also--and this adds immeasurably to the horror--their lips don't move when they speak to you, which combined with the voices they've chosen to accompany these soulless avatars, turns a Wii Yoga session into a clinical study on repressed psychological phobias. It isn't just me right?


The sound is textbook Nintendo fare, the music is all upbeat and energetic, while never actually falling into the category of something you would ever want to listen to outside of the game. Many of the mini-games have no music, presumably so you can concentrate on what you sound like when you're panting and wheezing alongside serene bird tweets, waterfalls, and the artificial sound of a bicycle or twirling hula hoops. One particularly notable thing they will do with musical accompaniment is during the rhythm games, where if you fall out of rhythm with the computer characters, the music in the background will get progressively more and more distorted and out of key, making it even harder to slip back into the groove and not feel like an uncoordinated dolt. The sound effects are nicely sampled and compact, making a cheering audience or a skateboard launching off a ramp all that much more immersive. The natural flipside to that however is that the bubbly panic noise your character makes just before you fail, or the meaty smack sound as you accidentally try to head something that isn't a soccer ball drives home with pitch perfect accuracy the realization that your lack of athleticism is the reason you got into videogames in the first place. Real videogames, ones that don't make a point to highlight how fat you are every single time you go to play them. Although I would probably get a sick joy out of a game containing a line of dialogue like "Hey butterball, why don't you and your diabetes go man that MG on the front line, and try not to get Cheeto dust all over my Humvee."

Story
No storyline? No problem.

As a participant in the "Whenever-I-Get-Around-To-It" International Wii-lympics, you must weather pre-season training in order to compete alongside your fellow bobble-headed countrymen. During your training you will participate in such difficult and grueling programs such as Hula Hoop, Driving Range, Running Over Moles with a Segway on the Beach, Guided Yoga, Risking Your Life on a Tightrope for the Entertainment of an Apartment Tenement, and Snowball Fight. Straining your mind and body day after day, attempting to better yourself for the sake of the competition ahead, you come to the dawning realization that you are stuck in a motion-controlled remake of Groundhog Day and that the Wii-lympics will never actually arrive.

Beer
I selected this alcohol purely for the whimsical humor involved in pairing a motion-controlled videogame with an alcohol called "Tilt". I'm confident the joke would have held up similarly if I had chosen to review a pinball machine. Needless to say, this isn't the first time my sense of whimsy has gotten me into trouble. The trouble in this case being a carbonated, radioactive blue drink with staggering alcohol-to-artificial flavor ratios. When I decided on Tilt, I didn't have any misconceptions of it being anything even approaching tolerable. All the same, I made sure to purchase two cans of this cylindrical savagery in order to absolutely guarantee that everything that happened during the course of the gameplay would be precisely calculated comedic suffering. In essence, I pranked myself, and the full brunt of such machinations only came fully into the light the next evening, when Tilt finally swept its scythe-like chemical shortcomings through my lower intestine. Let me assure you now, every possible negative point of Karma I could have conceivably accrued up to this point in my life was paid back ten-fold. To the guy in the blue Ford F-150 I cutoff in Redlands, CA on May 3rd, 2006: rest assured that I finally got what was coming to me. So what is Tilt good for other than involuntarily clearing your bowels and conscience in one fell swoop? In my limited estimation, it makes Budweiser look like champagne.

Smell
Tilt seems to gleefully fall into the ever-increasing vat of niche alcohols which seem to have been made in a dark, joyless corner of Willy Wonka's basement. The malt beverage which is so laden with fusel alcohol that the only way to get the FDA to approve it is to put enough sugar and artificial flavor in it that the primary health risk associated with it shifts from liver disease to type-II diabetes. This mixture is frighteningly apparent in the odor, where bouquets such as cotton candy and bubblegum mix indiscriminately with odors such as Nazi gas ovens. I know I commonly make such alliterations with other such drinks, and really, though I have a penchant for exaggeration, I've never once lied about my impressions of any beverage. If I'm telling you that a given drink which just so happens to match the color of certain aftermarket car stereo lights in both hue and intensity has an odor which reminds me of egregious human rights violations, I'm doing my best to package my honest, heartfelt warning in a humorous wrapper.

Taste
Considering the paragraph above, I would think that detailing the taste of Tilt would be redundant, but hey, I gotta fill the space anyway, so here it is. The best analogue I can think of to describe Tilt's taste would be if you actually had tastebuds on your jaw and someone stepped in a wino's vomit before kicking you in the face. The alcohol has fused with the sugar and artificial flavors and done something unholy in the process. The first sip will completely wrack your body with involuntary spasms as you unsuccessfully try to shake the taste out of yourself. You will make a face that communicates the same level of disgust at realizing you just mistook your mother's tube of yeast infection creme for toothpaste. As with most of these sugar-laden malt beverages, this reaction will never go away unless you either have your tongue surgically removed or get cast to star in an MTV reality TV show. If you are still wondering if the taste is really as bad as I seem to be making it out, please allow me to offer some personal insight. Back when I was a young, ignorant teenager, I had my own personal tier of preferred alcohols. At the very top were things such as fruit liqueurs and other sweet drinks. This led the way down to schnapps and wine coolers, then beers, then unmixed liquors, and finally, at the bottom of my list, whiskey and gin. Whiskey and gin were--and still are--only drinks I'll imbibe if held at gunpoint, and the face I make when drinking a shot of them is comical in how much naked dismay it manages to communicate. As of this writing, I swear on a stack of bibles that drinks such as Tilt and the like have handily taken the bottom spot on my list and in comparison, I look upon Tanqueray and Jack Daniels with admiration.

Intoxication
I am by my very nature a happy, quiet drunk. I am low-key and humorous, enjoying small gatherings of friends in a cozy, familiar atmosphere. Tilt changes this. With only a few tugs off of a can of Tilt, I can feel something inside my brain change, like a mean little lizard waking up. Before I know it, I'm more overbearing than normal, immediately assuming my opinion is not only correct, but completely welcome and fully appreciated by everyone within earshot. It isn't long before I suddenly sound exactly like a DudeBro and inwardly yearn for white sunglasses, a popped collar, and a portable shower filled with artificial tan. The last few brain cells that haven't been completely taken over by the Tilt ask all the DudeBro brain cells to calm down whereupon they are immediately pushed around by the DudeBro cells and get brain-sand kicked in their faces. I'm convinced this is how brain-damage happens. Please don't correct me.

Feel
Many people don't really think about it, but one's digestive tract is a very sensitive place. Minor changes in the chemical or biological composition of any sector of the digestive system can have far-reaching and very undesired results. Our bodies have, over time, adapted to our modern food intake, and is able to cope quite admirably with many of the things we consume. Still, the odd heartburn or belly ache is the price we pay for upsetting the delicate ecosystem that is our gastrointestinal tract.

Tilt doesn't give two shits in a rusty bucket about your digestive system. In fact, once Tilt has had its way with you, you'll wish you had a rusty bucket. While the sugar and alcohol wage war in your frontal lobes, every other ingredient in Tilt will be working hard to make sure everything south of your esophagus is having the worst day imaginable. Every sensation Tilt gives the body can be broadly categorized as "sharp". Not sharp as in smart or well-dressed or the TV brand, but sharp as in broken glass, splintered wood, and the kinds of pains doctors associate with tumors. Even the feel it gives in the mouth is overly carbonated and face-puckeringly savage, as if Tilt was something the military thought up as an "enhanced interrogation" technique. Everything Tilt does seems to be designed to make you suffer, from the way it sloshes angrily around on your tongue to the way it sloshes angrily around in your brain.

The Matchup
Life is always ready to teach us a lesson when our hubris gets the best of us, and this case was no exception. In pairing this sort-of painful thing (Wii Fit Plus) with this satanically painful thing (Tilt), I no doubt tempted fate. Fate answered in spectacular fashion, swooping in like a pissed-off Peregrine Falcon and tearing my face off before returning to the nest and feeding it to its offspring. The unimaginable folly inherent in drinking Tilt while engaging in strenuous physical activity may be one of the reasons I was never--and will never be--accepted to Harvard.

Cheers/Game on.